Om meg

onsdag 9. mai 2018

The
FAA will have 'zero tolerance' for anything less safe than current standards
when it comes to regulating flying cars

And there were zero fatalities in commercial airline crashes in 2017.

A concept design for a
flying car Uber

Uber gathered industry experts, from regulators to private companies, to
discuss the future of aviation as the ride-hail company sees it. Specifically,
flying cars.

Through its second-annual flying car summit in Los Angeles on Tuesday, Uber
wanted to set the stage for what it hopes will be a network of electric
vertical takeoff and landing vehicles, or unmanned vehicles that use propulsion
and rotors to push off and land on the ground vertically.

The company has said it hopes to begin testing a commercial service in Los
Angeles and Dallas Fort Worth by 2020, but there are a lot of obstacles Uber
has to get over to get to that point. Prime among them is regulation.

In a conversation with Uber Chief Product Officer Jeff Holden, the acting
administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration Dan Elwell said that while
he is confident the industry will eventually get the technology right, the
agency does not expect to compromise on safety in the meantime.

"What I will tell you unequivocally [is] there will be no degradation in
safety as we know it today," he said.

In 2017, there were zero recorded fatalities in crashes of commercial jets on
U.S. soil in 2017, for the fourth year in a row.

"You guys are discovering that the public demands a level of safety in
aviation that is unlike any other mode," Elwell added. "There is
absolutely zero tolerance for degradations of safety. [The industry has] to
come in at a level that's 100 years in the making. ... I'm confident that this
industry is going to come to the table not only with the innovative ideas that
have been obvious in the past decade but the safety solutions that make it that
much easier to put the regulatory umbrella over it."

Autonomous aerial vehicles are a substantially different mode of transportation
to regulate than autonomous cars, Elwell contended, an arena where Uber has
faced backlash after a recent fatality.

"It's completely different than the discussion of autonomous vehicles on
the surface," he said. "It's pretty much broad acceptance that
autonomous vehicles will bring an immediate improvement of safety by the
elimination of things that people bring. ... We don't have that assumption with
drones yet."

Elwell has not personally engaged with the company about regulating flying
cars, he told Recode, though the agency's certification and standards experts
are in constant dialogue with the industry.

At multiple points, the conversation became a discussion about some of the
approaches to managing and perhaps regulating flying cars that Uber is
currently contemplating as part of its internal efforts - not all of which
Elwell was enthusiastic about. At one point, Holden suggested creating
corridors of airspace that is not managed by the FAA but is instead delegated
to another entity that only operates flying cars.

"This is a much longer discussion," he responded.

"What you just described is what we don't want. You just described
segregated airspace," he continued. "At the scale you're talking
about - especially in complex dense airspace - my hope is we don't have to do
that. Even if you're going to do EVTOL from airports into the city, my hope is
you're going to be able to do it in an integrated way."

While Uber does not want to build these new autonomous aviation vehicles
itself, it does hope to give its manufacturing and other research partners the
tools to create this new technology in order to accelerate the path to having a
commercial network of flying cars.

Holden asked at one point: "We're building air traffic software - we're
doing that optimistically - basically we're betting that this technology will
be used. ... What do you think the best way to engage with the FAA is to make
sure we're aligned?"

Elwell responded that the administration is open to collaborating with the
industry but will need time to regulate the technology at the current pace of
development.

"You're bringing to the table things that ... its not new to us, but the
pace of development is challenging," he said. "So we need to come
together with a creative, innovative mindset but collaborative. ... The
industry is going to bring to us the solutions. The best way [is to] not only
bring to us the technology and the explanation of how it works but how it works
safely."

The company announced today that it wanted to have a commercial flying car
service up and running by 2023 in some places. Elwell said that timeline might
not be too ambitious.

"But I'm certainly not going to make any commitments," he said.

At one point, Holden interjected with a suggestion for one metric with which
the government might measure safety in unmanned aerial vehicles, saying,
"It's probably something like fatalities per passenger mile or something
like that."

"I don't want to belabor it [but] we have a very sacred public trust that
we've all worked hard for," Elwell responded. "When we introduce
something as dramatically new as automated flying vehicles, that is a challenge
that has to meet the bar. We're not going to go backwards, we're not going to
say let's see how it works ... we're not going to have a certain acceptable
accident rate."

Still, the acting administrator, who served in the FAA under the Bush administration
as well, said he would ride in an unmanned aerial vehicle himself and that he
was confident the technology would be safely developed in the coming years.